Iranian Scientist Claims To Invent ‘Time Machine’

An Iranian inventor recently claimed he created a “time machine,” according to reports. But the Internet is skeptical, and with good reason.

The Telegraph caused a stir Wednesday with a story about a young Tehran-based scientist, Ali Razeghi, and an invention he calls“The Aryayek Time Traveling Machine.” Reportedly something of a mad scientist, Razeghi claimed the device, which “easily fits into the size of a personal computer case,” can predict with 98-percent accuracy the future five to eight years of an individual’s life.

The Telegraph cited an earlier story, in Farsi, by Iranian news agency Fars. However, The Washington Post reports that Fars quietly deleted the story, even as it began to go viral among Western media outlets. (Fars’ link is now dead.) The Atlantic Wire points out that the story never even made it to the Science section on the site’s English-language side.

A separate interview with Razeghiwas published in Farsi by Iranian news site Entekhab. The story says Razeghi is a supervisor at Iran’s Center for Strategic Inventions and Inventors and claims that his baffling invention won’t be available for another few years, at least. “We’re waiting for conditions to improve in Iran,” Razeghi told the outlet, according to a translation by The Huffington Post.

Razeghi was coy during the interview, refusing to give out many details because he was worried his idea would be stolen and reproduced by China. He did say, however, that his device incorporates both hardware and software components, and that it cost roughly 500,000 Iranian tomans (about $400). When asked whether he was worried the machine might cause problems, he said he envisions it used selectively, to tell a couple the future sex of their child, for example.

Neither Iran nor Razeghi have publicly responded to the report.

Radio Free Europe writes that “most Iran watchers will be treating his announcement with a certain amount of skepticism,” in light of a recent flap that involved a Photoshopped picture of Iran’s Qaher-313 stealth fighter jet.

Scientists around the world have made previous claims (some dubious, some less so) about their own “time machine” inventions. In 2009, a man named Steve Gibbs, of Clearwater, Neb., said he had invented a “hyperdimensional resonator,” which he claimed could be used for “out-of-body time travel,”according to the Examiner.

More recently, in 2011, physicists from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., announced they had developed a “time cloak” that they say can hide events for trillionths of a second.

… Read more

My time machine works too.
When you push the button you will at that instant be traveling at 1,000,000,000,000 picoseconds per second into the future! My system uses the Big Bang as its energy source…I think. I can’t explain exactly why it works, but it works. I’ve space-time traveled to Maui, London, Paris … It’s awesome.

Scientists discover dark lightning

… scientists recently discovered something mind-bending about lightning: Sometimes its flashes are invisible, just sudden pulses of unexpectedly powerful radiation. It’s what Joseph Dwyer, a lightning researcher at the Florida Institute of Technology, has termed dark lightning.
Unknown to Franklin but now clear to a growing roster of lightning researchers and astronomers is that along with bright thunderbolts, thunderstorms unleash sprays of X-rays and even intense bursts of gamma rays, a form of radiation normally associated with such cosmic spectacles as collapsing stars. The radiation in these invisible blasts can carry a million times as much energy as the radiation in visible lightning, but that energy dissipates quickly in all directions rather than remaining in a stiletto-like lightning bolt.

Dark lightning appears sometimes to compete with normal lightning as a way for thunderstorms to vent the electrical energy that gets pent up inside their roiling interiors, Dwyer says. Unlike with regular lightning, though, people struck by dark lightning, most likely while flying in an airplane, would not get hurt. But according to Dwyer’s calculations, they might receive in an instant the maximum safe lifetime dose of ionizing radiation — the kind that wreaks the most havoc on the human body.

The only way to determine whether an airplane had been struck by dark lightning, Dwyer says, “would be to use a radiation detector. Right in the middle of [a flash], a very brief bluish-purple glow around the plane might be perceptible. Inside an aircraft, a passenger would probably not be able to feel or hear much of anything, but the radiation dose could be significant.”

However, because there’s only about one dark lightning occurrence for every thousand visible flashes and because pilots take great pains to avoid thunderstorms, Dwyer says, the risk of injury is quite limited. No one knows for sure if anyone has ever been hit by dark lightning.

About 25 million visible thunderbolts hit the United States every year, killing about 30 people and many farm animals, says John Jensenius, a lightning safety specialist with the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine. Worldwide, thunderstorms produce about a billion or so lightning bolts annually.

The conditions for lightning occur when powerful updrafts in cumulonimbus clouds force water droplets and ice crystals to rub against one another, creating massive amounts of positive- and negative-charged particles. The updrafts cause these two types of charged particles to separate, with the top of the thundercloud usually becoming positively charged as the lower part becomes negatively charged.

The air between the charges normally acts as an insulating layer, which means that no sparks can fly — no lightning — unless something causes that insulation to break down. Scientists have known from lab experiments that super-strong electric fields can temporarily convert the air’s electrically neutral molecules into a conductive pathway.

The trouble is, lightning researchers — despite decades of measurements from balloons, aircraft and rockets — have been unable to locate in thunderclouds electric fields sufficiently strong to trigger this insulator-to-conductor transformation.

To learn what might trigger the transformation, they began measuring radiation of the lightning that thunderstorms routinely emit and discovered something unexpected: the gamma rays and X-rays of dark lightning.

Nuclear explosions and collapsing stars — those are the sorts of extreme events that had been known to spew out gamma rays, not mere thunderstorms.

How is it that some storms produce these unusually strong rays? Dwyer speculates that super-fast electrons — perhaps revved up after being struck by cosmic rays that hit Earth’s atmosphere from deep space — may be the key. The theory is that these energetic electrons collide with atoms inside thunderclouds to create X-rays and gamma rays. These collisions lead to chain reactions that could be the mysterious basis for dark lightning.

Astronomers with access to gamma-ray detectors on satellites will be pivotal to discovering what causes dark lightning.

According to gamma-ray researcher J. Eric Grove of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, the gamma-ray flashes that Dwyer’s model describes match closely the best recent satellite measurements of thunderstorm emissions of these high-energy rays. But he also notes that recent data from an Italian satellite implies that thunderstorms might be producing gamma-ray flashes far more energetic than Dwyer’s theory can account for, adding mystery even as it helps confirm dark lightning’s existence.

… Read more

Interdisciplinary team demonstrates superconducting qualities of topological insulators

 

Topological insulators (TIs) are an exciting new type of material that on their surface carry electric current, but within their bulk, act as insulators. Since the discovery of TIs about a decade ago, their unique characteristics (which point to potential applications in quantum computing) have been explored theoretically, and in the last five years, experimentally.

But where in theory, the bulk of TIs carry no current, in the laboratory, impurities and disorder in real materials means the bulk is, in fact, conductive. This has proven an obstacle to experimentation with TIs: findings from prior experiments designed to test the surface conductivity of TIs unavoidably included contributions from the surplus of electrons in the bulk.

Now an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in collaboration with researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science Department, has measured superconductive surface states in TIs where the bulk charge carriers were successfully depleted. The research paper, “Symmetry protected Josephson supercurrents in three-dimensional topological insulators,” was published this week in Nature Communications.

The experiments, conducted in the laboratory of Illinois condensed matter physicist Nadya Mason at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, were carried out by postdoctoral research associate Sungjae Cho using TI material—specially developed by the Brookhaven team—coupled to superconducting leads.

To deplete the electrons in the bulk, the team used three strategies: the TI material was doped with antimony, then it was doped at the surface with a chemical with strong electron affinity, and finally an electrostatic gate was used to apply voltage that lowered the energy of the entire system.

“One of the main results we found,” said Mason, “was in comparing the two experimental regimes, pure surface (bulk depleted of electrons) vs. bulk (excess electrons present in impurities in bulk material). We learned that even when you have the bulk, the superconductivity always goes through the surface of the material.”

This finding was established by comparing experiments with theoretical modeling by research team members at Illinois’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering—Asst. Professor Matthew Gilbert and graduate student Brian Dellabetta—which showed that superconductivity occured only at the surface of topological insulators and that this is a unique characteristic of these new materials.

It’s been predicted that TIs harbor the highly sought Majorana quasiparticle, a fermion which is theorized to be its own antiparticle and which if discovered, could serve as a quantum bit in quantum computing.

“Since we now have a better understanding of how topological insulators behave with regard to superconductivity, this will assist our search for the Majorana quasiparticle,” Mason explained. …

via Interdisciplinary team demonstrates superconducting qualities of topological insulators.

Puzzle of how spiral galaxies set their arms comes into focus

As the shapes of galaxies go, the spiral disk — with its characteristic pinwheel profile — is by far the most pedestrian.

Our own Milky Way, astronomers believe, is a spiral. Our solar system and Earth reside somewhere near one of its filamentous, swept-back arms. And nearly 70 percent of the galaxies closest to the Milky Way are spirals, suggesting they have taken the most ordinary of galactic forms in a universe with billions of galaxies.

But despite their common morphology, how galaxies like ours get and maintain their characteristic arms has proved to be an enduring puzzle in astrophysics. How do the arms of spiral galaxies arise? Do they change or come and go over time?

The answers to these and other questions are now coming into focus as researchers capitalize on powerful new computer simulations to follow the motions of as many as 100 million “stellar particles” as gravity and other astrophysical forces sculpt them into familiar galactic shapes. Writing April 1 in the Astrophysical Journal, a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics report simulations that seem to resolve longstanding questions about the origin and life history of spiral arms in disk galaxies.

“We show for the first time that stellar spiral arms are not transient features, as claimed for several decades,” says UW-Madison astrophysicist Elena D’Onghia, who led the new research along with Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics colleagues Mark Vogelsberger and Lars Hernquist. “They are self-perpetuating, persistent and surprisingly long lived.”

The origin and fate of the emblematic spiral arms in disk galaxies have been debated by astrophysicists for decades, with two theories predominating: One holds that the arms come and go over time. A second and widely held theory is that the material that makes up the arms – stars, gas and dust – is affected by differences in gravity and jams up, like cars at rush hour, sustaining the arms for long periods.

The new results fall somewhere in between the two theories and suggest that the arms arise in the first place as a result of the influence of giant molecular clouds, star forming regions or nurseries common in galaxies. Introduced into the simulation, the clouds, says D’Onghia, a UW-Madison professor of astronomy, act as “perturbers” and are enough to not only initiate the formation of spiral arms but to sustain them indefinitely.

“We find they are forming spiral arms,” explains D’Onghia. “Past theory held the arms would go away with the perturbations removed, but we see that (once formed) the arms self-perpetuate, even when the perturbations are removed. It proves that once the arms are generated through these clouds, they can exist on their own through (the influence of) gravity, even in the extreme when the perturbations are no longer there.” …

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/uow-poh040213.php

New type of solar structure cools buildings in full sunlight

Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don’t heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any more.

A team of researchers at Stanford has designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining. Such a structure could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space. Their paper describing the device was published March 5 in Nano Letters.

“People usually see space as a source of heat from the sun, but away from the sun outer space is really a cold, cold place,” explained Shanhui Fan, professor of electrical engineering and the paper’s senior author. “We’ve developed a new type of structure that reflects the vast majority of sunlight, while at the same time it sends heat into that coldness, which cools manmade structures even in the day time.”

The trick, from an engineering standpoint, is two-fold. First, the reflector has to reflect as much of the sunlight as possible. Poor reflectors absorb too much sunlight, heating up in the process and defeating the purpose of cooling.

The second challenge is that the structure must efficiently radiate heat back into space. Thus, the structure must emit thermal radiation very efficiently within a specific wavelength range in which the atmosphere is nearly transparent. Outside this range, Earth’s atmosphere simply reflects the light back down. Most people are familiar with this phenomenon. It’s better known as the greenhouse effect—the cause of global climate change.

Two goals in one

The new structure accomplishes both goals. It is an effective a broadband mirror for solar light—it reflects most of the sunlight. It also emits thermal radiation very efficiently within the crucial wavelength range needed to escape Earth’s atmosphere.

Radiative cooling at nighttime has been studied extensively as a mitigation strategy for climate change, yet peak demand for cooling occurs in the daytime.

“No one had yet been able to surmount the challenges of daytime radiative cooling—of cooling when the sun is shining,” said Eden Rephaeli, a doctoral candidate in Fan’s lab and a co-first-author of the paper. “It’s a big hurdle.”

The Stanford team has succeeded where others have come up short by turning to nanostructured photonic materials. These materials can be engineered to enhance or suppress light reflection in certain wavelengths.

“We’ve taken a very different approach compared to previous efforts in this field,” said Aaswath Raman, a doctoral candidate in Fan’s lab and a co-first-author of the paper. “We combine the thermal emitter and solar reflector into one device, making it both higher performance and much more robust and practically relevant. In particular, we’re very excited because this design makes viable both industrial-scale and off-grid applications.”

Using engineered nanophotonic materials the team was able to strongly suppress how much heat-inducing sunlight the panel absorbs, while it radiates heat very efficiently in the key frequency range necessary to escape Earth’s atmosphere. The material is made of quartz and silicon carbide, both very weak absorbers of sunlight.

The new device is capable of achieving a net cooling power in excess of 100 watts per square meter. By comparison, today’s standard 10-percent-efficient solar panels generate the about the same amount of power. That means Fan’s radiative cooling panels could theoretically be substituted on rooftops where existing solar panels feed electricity to air conditioning systems needed to cool the building.

To put it a different way, a typical one-story, single-family house with just 10 percent of its roof covered by radiative cooling panels could offset 35 percent its entire air conditioning needs during the hottest hours of the summer.

Radiative cooling has another profound advantage over all other cooling strategy such as air-conditioner. It is a passive technology. It requires no energy. It has no moving parts. It is easy to maintain. You put it on the roof or the sides of buildings and it starts working immediately. …

via New type of solar structure cools buildings in full sunlight.

Cool! Cooling!

Wikileaks: The Government Is Spying On You Through Your iPhone

The FinFisher Trojan is government spyware that is installed via a phony iTunes update. Image by Gamma International UK Ltd.

Your iPhone could be spying on you, according to the latest trove of documents from Wikileaks, which looks like it could be the biggest scandal yet.

Called the Spyfiles, it’s a trove of documents about the “mass interception industry” — the massive post-9/11 surveillance community that electronically snoops on entire populations.

The industry is selling software to government agencies — some of it delivered by Trojans — that can take over your iPhone. It can track its every use, follow your movements (even in standby), recognize your voice, record conversations, and even capture video and audio from the room it is in.

It’s not just limited to iPhones, of course. There are various spyware packages that run on PCs, Android and Blackberry. The uses are mind-boggling. The CIA, for example, is using phone-tracking software to target drone strikes in the Middle East and Central Asia. It recognizes the subject by their voice print, but the actual targeting isn’t terribly accurate.

One of the most sophisticated spying packages — The FinFisher program, produced by the British company, Gamma International — is delivered via a phony iTunes update. The Wall Street Journal has more details on the FinFisher spyware, which is sold to police and government agencies. (Der Speigel has afascinating article about how it is marketed).

Apple just patched the vulnerability in iTunes update 10.5.1. (The vulnerability appears to be Windows only, but it’s not clear. It’s claimedApple knew about the problem for three years).

FinFisher says the spyware is legal and the company doesn’t know of abuses. But there’s evidence spyware was used to monitor political activists in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya during the Arab Spring, according to a big story about the latest Wikileaks leak in The Washington Post.

Read more

http://www.cultofmac.com/132782/if-you-thought-carrier-iq-scandal-was-bad-wait-till-you-see-latest-wikileaks/

More from Wikileaks:

Mass interception of entire populations is not only a reality, it is a secret new industry spanning 25 countries

It sounds like something out of Hollywood, but as of today, mass interception systems, built by Western intelligence contractors, including for ’political opponents’ are a reality. Today WikiLeaks began releasing a database of hundreds of documents from as many as 160 intelligence contractors in the mass surveillance industry. Working with Bugged Planet and Privacy International, as well as media organizations form six countries – ARD in Germany, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the UK, The Hindu in India, L’Espresso in Italy, OWNI in France and the Washington Post in the U.S. Wikileaks is shining a light on this secret industry that has boomed since September 11, 2001 and is worth billions of dollars per year. WikiLeaks has released 287 documents today, but the Spy Files project is ongoing and further information will be released this week and into next year.

International surveillance companies are based in the more technologically sophisticated countries, and they sell their technology on to every country of the world. This industry is, in practice, unregulated. Intelligence agencies, military forces and police authorities are able to silently, and on mass, and secretly intercept calls and take over computers without the help or knowledge of the telecommunication providers. Users’ physical location can be tracked if they are carrying a mobile phone, even if it is only on stand by.

But the WikiLeaks Spy Files are more than just about ’good Western countries’ exporting to ’bad developing world countries’. Western companies are also selling a vast range of mass surveillance equipment to Western intelligence agencies. In traditional spy stories, intelligence agencies like MI5 bug the phone of one or two people of interest. In the last ten years systems for indiscriminate, mass surveillance have become the norm. Intelligence companies such as VASTech secretly sell equipment to permanently record the phone calls of entire nations. Others record the location of every mobile phone in a city, down to 50 meters. Systems to infect every Facebook user, or smart-phone owner of an entire population group are on the intelligence market.

Selling Surveillance to Dictators
When citizens overthrew the dictatorships in Egypt and Libya this year, they uncovered listening rooms where devices from Gamma corporation of the UK, Amesys of France, VASTech of South Africa and ZTE Corp of China monitored their every move online and on the phone.

Surveillance companies like SS8 in the U.S., Hacking Team in Italy and Vupen in France manufacture viruses (Trojans) that hijack individual computers and phones (including iPhones, Blackberries and Androids), take over the device, record its every use, movement, and even the sights and sounds of the room it is in. Other companies like Phoenexia in the Czech Republic collaborate with the military to create speech analysis tools. They identify individuals by gender, age and stress levels and track them based on ‘voiceprints’. Blue Coat in the U.S. and Ipoque in Germany sell tools to governments in countries like China and Iran to prevent dissidents from organizing online.

Trovicor, previously a subsidiary of Nokia Siemens Networks, supplied the Bahraini government with interception technologies that tracked human rights activist Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar. He was shown details of personal mobile phone conversations from before he was interrogated and beaten in the winter of 2010-2011.

How Mass Surveillance Contractors Share Your Data with the State
In January 2011, the National Security Agency broke ground on a $1.5 billion facility in the Utah desert that is designed to store terabytes of domestic and foreign intelligence data forever and process it for years to come.

Telecommunication companies are forthcoming when it comes to disclosing client information to the authorities – no matter the country. Headlines during August’s unrest in the UK exposed how Research in Motion (RIM), makers of the Blackberry, offered to help the government identify their clients. RIM has been in similar negotiations to share BlackBerry Messenger data with the governments of India, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Weaponizing Data Kills Innocent People
There are commercial firms that now sell special software that analyze this data and turn it into powerful tools that can be used by military and intelligence agencies.

For example, in military bases across the U.S., Air Force pilots use a video link and joystick to fly Predator drones to conduct surveillance over the Middle East and Central Asia. This data is available to Central Intelligence Agency officials who use it to fire Hellfire missiles on targets.

The CIA officials have bought software that allows them to match phone signals and voice prints instantly and pinpoint the specific identity and location of individuals. Intelligence Integration Systems, Inc., based in Massachusetts – sells a “location-based analytics” software called Geospatial Toolkit for this purpose. Another Massachusetts company named Netezza, which bought a copy of the software, allegedly reverse engineered the code and sold a hacked version to the Central Intelligence Agency for use in remotely piloted drone aircraft.

IISI, which says that the software could be wrong by a distance of up to 40 feet, sued Netezza to prevent the use of this software. Company founder Rich Zimmerman stated in court that his “reaction was one of stun, amazement that they (CIA) want to kill people with my software that doesn’t work.”

Orwell’s World
Across the world, mass surveillance contractors are helping intelligence agencies spy on individuals and ‘communities of interest’ on an industrial scale.

The Wikileaks Spy Files reveal the details of which companies are making billions selling sophisticated tracking tools to government buyers, flouting export rules, and turning a blind eye to dictatorial regimes that abuse human rights.

…

You can’t easily remove the battery from an iPhone and a hack can make it *seem* to power off when it is really still on and recording. How cool. The capture of the darknet, data not available to most people, is our real 1984, without the “Big Brother is Watching” signs.

Laser-like photons signal major step towards quantum ‘Internet’

The realisation of quantum networks is one of the major challenges of modern physics. Now, new research shows how high-quality photons can be generated from ‘solid-state’ chips, bringing us closer to the quantum ‘internet’. The number of transistors on a microprocessor continues to double every two years, amazingly holding firm to a prediction by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore almost 50 years ago. If this is to continue, conceptual and technical advances harnessing the power of quantum mechanics in microchips will need to be investigated within the next decade. Developing a distributed quantum network is one promising direction pursued by many researchers today.

A variety of solid-state systems are current

ly being investigated as candidates for quantum bits of information, or qubits, as well as a number of approaches to quantum computing protocols, and the race is on for identifying the best combination. One such qubit, a quantum dot, is made of semiconductor nanocrystals embedded in a chip and can be controlled electro-optically

Single photons will form an integral part of distributed quantum networks as flying qubits. First, they are the natural choice for quantum communication, as they carry information quickly and reliably across long distances. Second, they can take part in quantum logic operations, provided all the photons taking part are identical. Unfortunately, the quality of photons generated from solid-state qubits, including quantum dots, can be low due to decoherence mechanisms within the materials. With each emitted photon being distinct from the others, developing a quantum photonic network faces a major roadblock.

Now, researchers from the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University have implemented a novel technique to generate single photons with tailored properties from solid-state devices that are identical in quality to lasers. Their research is published today in the journal Nature Communications.

As their photon source, the researchers built a semiconductor Schottky diode device containing individually addressable quantum dots. The transitions of quantum dots were used to generate single photons via resonance fluorescence — a technique demonstrated previously by the same team.Under weak excitation, also known as the Heitler regime, the main contribution to photon generation is through elastic scattering. By operating in this way, photon decoherence can be avoided altogether. The researchers were able to quantify how similar these photons are to lasers in terms of coherence and waveform — it turned out they were identical.”Our research has added the concepts of coherent photon shaping and generation to the toolbox of solid-state quantum photonics,” said Dr Mete Atature from the Department of Physics, who led the research.

“We are now achieving a high-rate of single photons which are identical in quality to lasers with the further advantage of coherently programmable waveform — a significant paradigm shift to the conventional single photon generation via spontaneous decay.” ,,,,

via Laser-like photons signal major step towards quantum ‘Internet’.

CERN: New particle is confirmed Higgs boson

A new particle discovered at the Large Hadron Collider last year has been confirmed to be the Higgs boson.
Here, proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider showing events consistent with the Higgs. (Credit: CERN/CMS/Taylor, L; McCauley, T)

Physicists from the Atlas and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced Thursday that they are “confident” a particle discovered last summer is indeed a Higgs boson.

The long-sought Higgs particle is theorized to give matter its mass, and finding it would fill gaps in the Standard Model of physics. After analyzing the subatomic particle’s spin and parity, researchers determined the zero-spin particle is consistent with the Higgs.

Now scientists want to collect more data to determine if this particle is the “plain vanilla” version of the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. Other theories allow room for multiple versions of the Higgs particle. A popular but as-yet unsubstantiated theory called supersymmetry suggests there should be as many as five Higgs particles.

“The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is,” said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela.

“This is the start of a new story of physics,” said Tony Weidberg, Oxford University physicist and a collaborator on the Atlas experiment.

“This is very exciting because if the spin-zero determination is confirmed, it would be the first elementary particle to have zero spin. So this is really different to anything we have seen before.” …

http://pheed.upi.com/click.phdo?i=9a2802e60d4a1059e0b9999d3fe33d21

NASA has found a free particle accelerator floating in space

In early 2007, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft observed something extraordinary around Saturn. An unusually strong blast of solar wind sent subatomic particles crashing into the ringed planet’s magnetic field, giving rise to perhaps the most tremendous shock wave ever observed emanating from the planet. But newly announced findings reveal the biggest surprise was yet to come.

The artist’s impression above depicts the scene just described. Cassini can be seen at left. Emanating from the planet, grey-striped and toroidal, is Saturn’s magnetosphere. The shock wave — what is known more formally as the “bow shock” region — is depicted in wispy blue.

Being carried in that shockwave are the solar particles that collided with Saturn’s magnetosphere — and they’re traveling fast. Observations from Cassini indicate that Saturn’s bow shock had managed to accelerate these subatomic particles to nearly the speed of light. That’s a feat more typical of shockwaves around distant supernovas, or particle accelerators here on Earth. Massive though it was, Saturn’s bow shock would have been necessary, but not sufficient, to produce such high-energy particles — so how did they manage to get moving so fast?

The answer has to do with the orientation of the shock relative to Saturn’s magnetic field. Under what are known as “quasi-parallel” conditions, a planet’s magnetic field (depicted here with blue lines) will run almost parallel to a vector emanating outward from the edge of the shockwave (depicted in red).

Under “quasi-perpendicular” conditions, the magnetic field lines run more or less perpendicular to the vector. The former describes a scenario wherein the magnetic field lines and the outward direction of the shock wave are more or less aligned, and favorable to particle acceleration. According to NASA, what Cassini observed was, in fact, the first detection of significant acceleration of electrons in a quasi-parallel shock at Saturn.

Shock waves are not rare in and of themselves, but ones capable of accelerating particles to close to the speed of light are typically observed around supernova remnants that exist well beyond our immediate solar neighborhood. “Cassini has essentially given us the capability of studying the nature of a supernova shock in situ in our own solar system,” explained astronomer Adam Masters, who led the investigation into Saturn’s unprecedented cosmic wave, “bridging the gap to distant high-energy astrophysical phenomena that are usually only studied remotely.”

In other words: supernovas are far. Saturn, on a cosmic scale, is right down the street. Its quasi-parallel shocks, however rare, provide us with a valuable means of studying supernova shocksright here in our own solar system; and Cassini gives us front row seats. ….

http://io9.com/

How particle smasher and telescopes relate (What the universe is made of)

… What the universe is made of …

Over the last few decades, scientists have come to the conclusion that the universe’s composition is only about 5% atoms — in other words, the stuff that we see and know around us. That means the rest is stuff we can’t see. About 71% is something called “dark energy,” and another 24% is “dark matter.”

Research is ongoing to figure out precisely what these “dark” components are, because they do not interact with ordinary matter and have never been directly detected.

But the large-scale structure of the universe depends on dark matter. “Without the dark matter, all the stars would fly away,” said Adam Riess, physicist at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Dark energy is thought to be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe, and Riess’s Nobel-prize winning work supports this theory.

In principle, these phenomena are everywhere — but how can we find them?

What particle physicists are really looking for

All that space in between star clusters is not empty at all. Particle physicists are hoping to get a better understanding of space time, the fabric of the universe.

There are particles hiding behind this fabric that we don’t normally see, but with enough energy you can draw them into existence, Incandela said. Scientists expect several as-yet-unseen particles to be there because they help fill gaps in the Standard Model of particle physics. The LHC uses high-energy particle collisions to try to find them.

Incandela likens this to being in a boat with fish underneath, which are nibbling at the surface. It takes a lot of energy to pull one out. The Higgs boson, being so hard to pin down, would be like a whale, Incandela said.

One pitfall of this analogy is that you can easily identify real fish, but it’s a lot harder to classify particles that slip in and out of existence in less than a second.

The particle that has made headlines recently is the Higgs boson, aka “God particle” — a term a lot of scientists hate. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman wrote a book with “God Particle” in the title, but reportedly said he’d actually wanted to call it the “Goddamn Particle.”

This particle is a component of something called the Higgs field. Brian Greene, theoretical physicist at Columbia University and “NOVA” host, describes it this way:

“You can think of it as a kind of molasses-like bath that’s invisible, but yet we’re all immersed within it,” he said. “And as particles like electrons try to move through the molasses-like bath, they experience a resistance. And that resistance is what we, in our big everyday world, think of as the mass of the electron.”

Without this “substance,” made up of Higgs particles, the electron would have no mass, and we would not be here at all. It’s not a perfect metaphor, though; we don’t feel particularly sticky.

The collision energy at the LHC went up to 8 TeV (trillion electron volts) in 2012, a record for the amount of energy in particle collisions. After downtime of about two years, it will come back online with 13 TeV.

With higher energies, it may be possible to detect the signature of dark matter, learn more precise properties of the particle that looks like the Higgs, find evidence of extra dimensions and perhaps find out whether gravity itself has a particle.

“If you want to understand the big, you have to understand the small,” Primack said. …

via How particle smasher and telescopes relate – CNN.com.